• RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    6 hours ago

    My nextdoor neighbor was in her class at the time. His thousand-yard stare when he got home that day was quite haunting.

  • zod000@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    94
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    17 hours ago

    We watched it live in elementary school, most of the kids didn’t get what had happened right away. Our teacher was just standing there stunned until an announcement came on the intercom asking all the teachers to turn it off. They didn’t say anything to us, just tried to pretend like we didn’t just watch people blow up live.

    • mienshao@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      13 hours ago

      You actually didn’t watch people get blown up live. The crew survived the fire blast—it was the crash into the water ~3 mins later that killed them.

    • Punkie@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      40
      ·
      16 hours ago

      It’s the “not handling” part that gets us as kids. We knew better. Adults didn’t. In my case, I was in high school, but it was on a “Teacher workday, student holiday” we had each semester. I watched it live on NASA TV, which we had on channel UHF 55 in the DC area. Even the voice of mission control delayed about a minute or two. I remember thinking, “THAT didn’t look good…” but then they said nothing but normal speed and temp readings, so I thought it was just the angle of the chase plane. Only when the famous “forked cloud” appeared that the announcer said, “we have an apparent major malfunction,” or something.

  • candyman337@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    73
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    17 hours ago

    The engineers knew! They begged them to stop the launch, but of course, no one makes the wheels not capitalism stop rolling! profit progress at all costs!

    • kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 hours ago

      no one makes the wheels not capitalism stop rolling! profit progress at all costs!

      I am honestly not sure what you’re trying to say here but I’m curious what NASA is selling that you threw capitalism in there.

    • TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      18
      ·
      12 hours ago

      Maybe it’s because it’s because I just finished reading this section in Range, but I think it’s more than the engineers knew.

      When sociologist Diane Vaughan interviewed NASA and Thiokol engineers who had worked on the rocket boosters, she found that NASA’s own famous can-do culture manifested as a belief that everything would be fine because “we followed every procedure”; because “the [flight readiness review] process is aggressive and adversarial”; because “we went by the book.” NASA’s tools were its familiar procedures. The rules had always worked before. But with Challenger they were outside their usual bounds, where “can do” should have been swapped for what Weick calls a “make do” culture. They needed to improvise rather than throw out information that did not fit the established rubric.

      Roger Boisjoly’s unquantifiable argument that the cold weather was “away from goodness” was considered an emotional argument in NASA culture. It was based on interpretation of a photograph. It did not conform to the usual quantitative standards, so it was deemed inadmissible evidence and disregarded. The can-do attitude among the rocket-booster group, Vaughan observed, “was grounded in conformity.” After the tragedy, it emerged that other engineers on the teleconference agreed with Boisjoly, but knew they could not muster quantitative arguments, so they remained silent. Their silence was taken as consent. As one engineer who was on the Challenger conference call later said, “If I feel like I don’t have data to back me up, the boss’s opinion is better than mine.”

      I think most of us believe decisions should be data driven, but in some edge cases gut instinct is valuable.

      It is easy to say in retrospect. A group of managers accustomed to dispositive technical information did not have any; engineers felt like they should not speak up without it. Decades later, an astronaut who flew on the space shuttle, both before and after Challenger, and then became NASA’s chief of safety and mission assurance, recounted what the “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data” plaque had meant to him: “Between the lines it suggested that, ‘We’re not interested in your opinion on things. If you have data, we’ll listen, but your opinion is not requested here.’”

  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    36
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    15 hours ago

    The soviet space program took fewer lives than the US’s program, yet the US constantly made it seem like it was the soviets that didn’t care about human lives.

    • Bldck@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      21
      ·
      14 hours ago

      I mean… not really.

      🛰️ Space Race Fatalities Comparison: Soviet Union vs United States

      Aspect 🇺🇸 United States 🇷🇺 Soviet Union
      Total astronaut/cosmonaut deaths 9–10 (incl. test/training accidents) 8 (official)
      On-mission fatalities 3 (Apollo 1, ground test) 4 (Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11)
      Training/test deaths (astronauts) 6+ (e.g. Theodore Freeman, C.C. Williams) 4+ (e.g. Valentin Bondarenko, others possibly unacknowledged)
      Deaths among ground personnel <10 100+ (notably the Nedelin disaster)
      Transparency High (accidents publicized and investigated) Low (many incidents hidden until after 1989)
      Major catalyst event Apollo 1 fire Soyuz 1, Nedelin disaster

      Key Takeaways
      • 🇺🇸 U.S. suffered more astronaut fatalities, including test pilots and training accidents.
      • 🇷🇺 Soviets had higher total human losses, especially among engineers and soldiers during explosive launch and fuel testing incidents.
      • 🔥 The Apollo 1 fire led to sweeping design and safety reforms in NASA.
      • 🚨 The Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 tragedies were fatal in-flight accidents; Soyuz 11 remains the only in-space human fatality.
      • 🕵️ The Nedelin disaster, one of the worst rocket catastrophes in history, killed over 100 but was kept secret for decades.
      • 🧾 Transparency and institutional accountability were key differences: NASA publicly investigated accidents; the USSR often concealed failures.
      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        edit-2
        13 hours ago

        You can certainly blur the space race with missile development as they were intimately tied on both sides, and if you want to include it then the deaths from the US ICBM disasters need to be included as well, but I do think it’s a bit absurd to uncritically report that 100+ people died in Nedelin when official numbers revealed it to be 54. Plus, wherever you sourced this from is clearly generally biased against the soviets beyond the scope of this report.

  • vfreire85@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    14 hours ago

    i wasn’t born back then, but i remember watching a punky brewster episode rerun when i was a kid that was about it. probably the first time i heard about the challenger disaster.

  • Jerb322@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    47
    ·
    17 hours ago

    I think I was in 7th grade. We were watching. Right in front of our eyes and could hardly believe it. Everyone inhaled sharply and then a couple of short screems, then silence. After a good 5 minutes, our teacher came to his senses, turned off the TV, and started talking about being right with god because you never know when it’s your turn.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      11 hours ago

      Which could have been the weirdest tangent on a Wikipedia page. Jim Henson, Muppets, Sesame Street, retired characters, Big Bird, oh was that an early version of Abelardo?, Challenger shuttle dis-- what. What? What the fuck?!

      When the guy who played Mr. Hooper died, they worked that into the show. The cast, sincerely grieving, had to explain to a seven-foot-tall canary that he wasn’t coming back. That’s not really he same kind of intrusion from reality, as acknowledging the same giant fowl fucking exploded on national television.

      The only possible comparison would be if some show had a gimmicky live episode that happened to be scheduled for 9 AM, on a Tuesday, in September of 2001.

  • Schwim Dandy@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    37
    ·
    17 hours ago

    The crew didn’t blow up(src).

    The flight, and the astronauts’ lives, did not end at that point, 73 seconds after launch. After Challenger was torn apart, the pieces continued upward from their own momentum, reaching a peak altitude of 65,000 feet before arching back down into the water. The cabin hit the surface 2 minutes and 45 seconds after breakup, and all investigations indicate the crew was still alive until then.

    We were led out of our classrooms to watch it since we lived in FL. When the launch went pear-shaped, nobody really understood what had happened, we just thought it was part of the fuel tanks dropping away. We went back in, sat down and continued our day. I don’t think the teachers ever told us something went wrong and I found out about it that night at home.

    • Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      15 hours ago

      Um, actually! berdly-actually

      The crew didn’t blow up instantly at all, at that exact moment! They spent another three minutes falling back to Earth, where they blew up instantly upon hitting the surface! berd-up

      • Schwim Dandy@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        13 hours ago

        There were no explosive materials onboard the crew pod so no, still no explosion when hitting the water. If anything, it would be closer to an implosion.

  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    15 hours ago

    It was a snow day. A neighbor saw it live from his huge-ass satellite dish. He called to tell me it blew up, and I thought he was taking the piss.

  • PunnyName@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    16 hours ago

    I was only 4 years and 4 months old, I can barely remember anything of that time.

    But when Columbia was en route to enter the atmosphere, I was outside on the front lawn watching, since it was re-entering over my area of Texas at a pretty favorable viewing angle.

    I was so fucking happy to see such a momentous occasion…until it started breaking up. I knew something was wrong, but my brain couldn’t piece it together, until the ship started breaking apart into visibly distinct fireballs. It passed over the horizon, and I was stunned. I ran back into my friend’s living room, and continued watching the coverage, now very sombre.

    It was 17 years and 4 days after Challenger. I was 21. That shit is burned into my memory. Especially since 9/11 was less than 18 months prior, which I also watched live.

  • WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    16 hours ago

    I watched it in person, sort of.

    I was living on the Florida Gulf Coast at the time. From the Gulf Coast, a shuttle launch was just a bright bead drawing a thin line up from the horizon, so it wasn’t any sort of spectacle, but it was something interesting to watch if you happened to be outside, which I was.

    And it was obvious even from there what had likely happened, since the bright bead suddenly flashed, then went out, and the line went off sideways.

  • Øπ3ŕ@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    14 hours ago

    My entire school was gathered in the cafeteria for the event, televised live.

    We were all sent home for the day (some took the week) in the ensuing chaos.

  • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    edit-2
    16 hours ago

    Could have been worse. They wanted to send Big Bird.

    Also, I wasn’t in kindergarten yet or I’d have seen it. I think this is a core Gen X memory that Millennials don’t have.

    • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      6 hours ago

      There’s speculation that Reagan was the impetus behind the “go fever” that caused the Challenger disaster. The idea is that he wanted to have a live uplink to Challenger during his State of the Union, and that his desire to use them as props was why NASA was in such an all-fired hurry to launch no matter the consequences.

      No idea how grounded in reality the speculation is, but it tracks for Reagan.

    • cheers_queers@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      16 hours ago

      Yeah millenial’s earliest memory of tragedy is said to be 9/11. Can confirm as a baby millenial who was 7 at the time.